Eliya Sotskyver, the co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, announced through his official account on platform X his decision to leave the company after about a decade since its founding. He expressed confidence in his company’s ability to build safe and beneficial artificial intelligence under the leadership of CEO Sam Altman, President Greg Brockman, and CTO Mira Murati.
Sam Altman confirmed that Eliya is considered one of the greatest minds of their generation and praised his performance at the company. Jacob Patochuk, the former research director at OpenAI who led the development of projects such as GPT-4 and OpenAI Five, will now assume Sotskyver’s role as chief scientist.
Although Sotskyver and Altman exchanged appreciation in their farewell messages, they were both involved in the company’s biggest scandal last year. In November, the OpenAI Board surprised everyone by firing Altman and CEO Greg Brockman. The company that owns ChatGPT announced at the time that “the board no longer had confidence in Altman’s ability to continue leading OpenAI.”
Sotskyver, who was a board member, was involved in their dismissal, requesting Altman and Brockman to attend separate meetings to inform them of their firing. According to reports at the time, there was a disagreement between Altman and Sotskyver regarding the speed of development and marketing of generative artificial intelligence technology at OpenAI.
However, Altman and Brockman were reinstated to their positions just five days after their dismissal, and the original board was dissolved and replaced with a new one. Shortly before that, Sotskyver posted a statement on platform X expressing regret for his involvement in the board’s actions and pledged to do his utmost to reunite the company. He then resigned from his position as a board member. Despite still being the chief scientist, The New York Times noted that he has not yet returned to work.
His role in transforming the new project into one of great importance cannot be denied, but he has not reveal any details yet. As for the OpenAI platform, it recently unveiled the GPT-4o model, which is said to be capable of recognizing emotions and processing and generating texts, audio, and images.
